Attackers who gain access to cryptographic keys and other secrets can potentially perform unauthorized operations or forge transactions. Thus, in many systems, such as smartcard-based electronic payment schemes, secrets need to be protected in tamper-resistant hardware. However, recent work by Cryptography Research has shown that smartcards and other devices can be compromised if information about cryptographic secrets leaks to attackers who monitor devices' external characteristics such as power consumption or electromagnetic radiation.
In both symmetric and asymmetric cryptosystems, secret parameters should be kept confidential, since an attacker who compromises a key can decrypt communications, forge signatures, perform unauthorized transactions, impersonate users, or cause other problems. Methods for managing keys securely using physically secure, well-shielded rooms are known in the background art and are widely used today. However, previously-known methods for protecting keys in low-cost cryptographic devices are often inadequate for many applications, such as those with challenging engineering constraints (cost, size, performance, etc.) or that require a high degree of tamper resistance. Attacks such as reverse-engineering of ROM using microscopes, timing attack cryptanalysis (see, for example, P. Kocher, “Timing Attacks on Implementations of Diffie-Hellman, RSA, DSS, and Other Systems,” Advances in Cryptology—CRYPTO '96, Springer-Verlag, pages 104-113), and error analysis (see, for example, E. Biham and A. Shamir, “Differential Fault Analysis of Secret Key Cryptosystems,” Advances in Cryptology—CRYPTO '97, Springer-Verlag, 1997, pages 513-525) have been described for analyzing cryptosystems.
Key management techniques are known in the background art for preventing attackers who compromise devices from deriving past keys. For example, ANSI X9.24, “Financial services—retail management” defines a protocol known as Derived Unique Key Per Transaction (DUKPT) that prevents attackers from deriving past keys after completely compromising a device's state. Although such techniques can prevent attackers from deriving old keys, they have practical limitations and do not provide effective protection against external monitoring attacks in which attackers use partial information about current keys to compromise future ones.
Cryptography Research has also developed methods for using iterated hashing operations to enable a client and server to perform cryptographic operations while the client protects itself against external monitoring attacks. In such methods, the client repeatedly applies a cryptographic function to its internal secret between or during transactions, such that information leaked in each of a series of transactions cannot be combined to compromise the secret. However, the system described has a disadvantage in that the server must perform a similar sequence of operations to re-derive the symmetric session key used in each transaction. Thus, in cases such as where there are a large number of unsynchronized server devices (such as electronic cash applications where a large number of merchant terminals operate as independent servers) or if servers have limited memory, the server cannot reliably precompute all possible session keys clients might use. As a result, transaction performance can suffer since a relatively large number of operations may be required for the server to obtain the correct session key. For example, the n-th client session key can require n server operations to derive. A fast, efficient method for obtaining leak-resistant and/or leak-proof symmetric key agreement would thus be advantageous.